Is not the example of "cash advance with a Discover card" the exact thing being done when you pass a budget that exceeds the debt ceiling and then simply expect that ceiling to be raised down the road? Hell, it's even worse than that -- it's like charging more to your credit card than your maximum spending limit and then just assuming the credit card will raise your cap to compensate.
No, it's more like starting a bunch of useless wars while passing tax cuts to billionaires, but keeping the war funding "off the books" until the next guy has to come in to office to clean up the fucking mess you created.
Which, come to think of it, is precisely what the Republicans did.
It should be easy enough to analyze and identify the accounts involved if that is happening.
Not so. Only the Slashdot site mods themselves can see who modded on a given comment and when. As stated previously: the sleeper accounts are virtually invisible because they never post.
The top 10% of earners, above 114,000, pay 70% of all income taxes.
And 400 people control more than half of the wealth in the country. You don't see an inherent problem here?
So, no, the middle class pays less than the rich.
If you define "the rich" as people who make above $114,000 per year. Which still doesn't account for your lousy math and inability to calculate the crucial percentage of individual income number from what you claim above.
Meanwhile, Democrats have defined "the rich" as people making above $200k/year individually or $250k total household income. Republicans insist that these people are "not making all that much." What was your point about who the "rich" are again? Please do define your terms so that we can have an actual discussion here.
The lower 50%, below $33,000, pays almost nothing.
Funny thing about that: if you are making below $33,000 per year at today's prices, you have almost no disposable income to start with: you are making the equivalent of $6000 in 1970 money (feel free to run some other calculations yourself. This is especially true if you are a single parent or have someone else (aging family member) to support. The phrase you are looking for is "blood from a stone."
Short-term capital gains taxes go up with your tax bracket, and the rate is the same. Even if you bought something at $10,000 and a few laters it grew with inflation to $10,500, you still have to pay tax on the $500 even though you technically didn't make any money. Long-term rates are less in order to offset inflation losses and encourage long-term investment that helps the economy over quick flipping.
Please get an education and learn to stop lying. All you have to do is hold an "investment" for slightly longer than a year to get it taxed at a mere 15% instead of your actual income-tax rate. The more money people have, the more money they simply funnel through "cycling" schemes that contribute NOTHING to the economy, in order to take advantage of this loophole.
Capital gains taxes need to be eliminated, pure and simple, and any money gained that way treated as what it is, INCOME and taxed accordingly.
The only problem with your conspiracy theory is that mod points are handed out semi-randomly. They also expire after about 48 hours. Above and beyond that, you have to contribute and have your posts modded up to get mod points (at least that has been my experience).
Incorrect. As currently designed, mod points are good for a week after they are awarded.I have had a pool of 15 mod points to use for a few days now, but I chose to comment in many cases instead; thus, the system is broken because the people who abuse modfarming can use theirs freely, while good commenters are forced to choose between commenting and modding. I could moderate, and fix some of the abuses I'm seeing today, but only at the cost of my comments vanishing from this discussion.
There is also a "bias" towards giving mod points to accounts that have Excellent karma, but it's not that much higher than the chance given to "good" karma accounts. By definition, the sleeper mod accounts will never be modded below Good because they are not used for posting. No posts = no downmods. Good karma = a reasonably high chance that a sleeper account will have modpoints to burn, especially as an aggregate portion of a swarm of sleeper accounts.
Estanislao Mart describes the behavior of previous bot-farm makers. I am proposing that the behavior I am seeing on Slashdot is 100% consistent with this sort of behavior. Posts that are -1, Flamebait/Troll/Overrated fly up to 5, Insightful and posts that are 5, Insightful fall all the way to -1 in the span of only a few minutes, and they do it in large quantities - to the order of around 50 posts on which this behavior was happening. Many posts would vacillate up and down, between 0 and 4, continually as I refreshed the discussion.
This is not "moderating." On the scale this is occurring, someone has a point farm running and is abusing the system.
When comments that were previously at +5, Insightful are down to -1, Flamebait/Troll/Overrated in the span of ~10 minutes, it's a sure bet that the system is being abused.
In the same moment that the Republicans are screaming about how it's time to "cut costs" (e.g. fire employees), they are screaming about how "that damn evil nigger Obama" is "raising unemployment."
How, precisely, does firing a bunch of people lower unemployment? Doesn't it, in fact, RAISE unemployment?
Being a Republican requires a brain that can hold 4 contradictory ideas at once while not being aware of the level of cognitive dissonance at work.
The Republicans RELY on single-issue and low-information voters.
For single-issue, they have the "OMG THE GUVMINT WANTS TO DESTROY YOUR CHURCH" fringe, like what happened recently when they started to trump up accusations that Houston National Cemetary had banned the words "god" and "jesus" from ceremonies held there (not REMOTELY true, but that doesn't stop the noise machine from self-referencing and insisting "but I have a source" over and over again in an argument that would make even Wikipedia partisans look downright sane by comparison). Or they have the homophobe fringe, as evidenced the rise of Rick Santorum and Michele "Homophobe Barbie" Bachmann as candidates.
Fortunately, people are getting wise to these two fringes and they're falling fast.
The larger problem is the low-information/disinformation followers who are permanently attached to the noise machine, the kind of people who think Rush is actually "talent on loan from God" (as he bills himself), that Glenn Beck is anything but an insane psychopath, and that Fox News is actually "balanced" in any way, shape, or form.
The Faux News/Tea Partier "bury brigade" has been running through Slashdot lately, if you didn't notice. I just watched in the last hour as every insightful, factually supported comment that contradicted them got downmodded 2-3 points while every copypaste of their idiotic rants somehow got upmodded the same amount.
Someone's playing the modpoint lottery with a ton of fake accounts to pull this off. I counted roughly 300 points worth of modding in that short time frame. Slashdot never sees that kind of behavior in normal modding. The last time I saw this it was when the Ron Paulbots were out in force.
Then I went to one of their rallies and saw the raw racism and insanity of their followers.
"Taxed enough already" - you do realize taxes are the lowest that they've been since the 1950's, right? That the "top income earners" actually, after you count up all the loopholes and compare how much of their "income" actually gets taxed at the much lower Capital Gains rates, actually pay less in taxes than the middle class do?
This is the problem today. There is so much disinformation and misinformation spewed out there by Rush, Beck, Faux News, and the rest of the insane nutwing noise machine that large numbers of people are willing to give them the "well if even if a little of what they say is true" benefit of the doubt. And then we get people like you who wind up with "sympathy" for the Tea Partiers because you aren't informed enough to realize how full of crap the Tea Party is.
The Treasury Department can prioritize payments in order to avoid a default
Which means that seniors, people on medicare assistance due to crippling injuries or congenital disorders, and the military would then NOT GET their checks.
In addition, the Treasury could sell some of its assets in order to pay the bills.
Which assets, pray tell? And what do we do when the question of use of those assets comes up later? You sound like one of those "privatize the public parks and turn them all into Six Flags or Casino properties" fucktards.
There are approximately $2.6 trillion dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund; those assets can be used to pay benefits.
And once we do that, the Social Security trust fund ceases to generate revenue returns, because most of the "trust fund" is actually backing a number of other investments and GENERATING INTEREST.
Furthermore, there is already trillions of dollars of interagency debt that counts toward the $14.29 trillion debt limit. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could convert that inter-agency debt into publicly-held debt, preventing not only a technical default but also preventing any delay in government payments. While the Treasury cannot use money from the Social Security Trust Fund, it can “disinvest” from other trust funds to pay for benefits. The Treasury Department could also make cash available from the trust fund by “disinvesting” some of the money used to buy government bonds. The disinvesting approach is a temporary accounting device that would help maintain the Treasury’s cash flow.
In other words, you think playing shell games, the equivalent of paying this month's Mastercard bill with a cash advance from Discover Card, is a good idea?
FUCKTARD.
In other words, the debt ceiling being reached will have little affect on seniors, poor people, veterans, military + their families. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Republicans also offered to raise the debt limit as long as the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill was passed, and it is the president who is failing to compromise with them and is waging a mostly emotional political fight that has little to no basis on facts at the expense of not coming to an agreement in time.
You're a fucking fool. The "Cut, Cap, and Balance" bill is one step shy of this level of dishonestycome out of the Tea Party crowd lately.
Also, for god's sake, learn the difference between "effect" and "affect" please. I swear, you Republicans should learn to get beyond your 2nd-grade-equivalent "high school diplomas" with the school administrator's name scrawled in crayon.
The first problem was that the controller was RSI-inducing after only a couple minutes. The second problem was that the music was shit. The third problem is that Guitar Hero/Rock Band are COMMUNITY games; you need to be able to have friends pick up and play with you. DJ'ing is not a community activity.
Kotick, meanwhile, should be fired for his policy of running franchises into the ground constantly. Activision's primary mistake is keeping him and his suck-ups on the payroll.
The key wording is that the FLIR cameras were "not in general use by the public" and were therefore disallowed.
Several appellate courts have now ruled that in their jurisdictions, the cameras are "widely available to the public" and therefore "in general use" and therefore no longer covered by the Kyllo ruling.
Always gotta watch for the weasel words that bribed assholes like Thomas slip into the rulings. The devil's in the details...
If this document was ever covered by any of the various discovery orders in any of the various filesharing lawsuits, then the failure of the media companies to release it is at very least contempt of court, not to mention prejudicial reason to overturn the results of any and all similar cases in favor of the defendants.
Yeah. This was more a case of "You idiot prosecutor, the law you charged them under has nothing to do with this case and is completely inapplicable. Oh, and by the way, we don't agree with the trumped-up 'resisting arrest' bullshit you tried to tag on either."
From comparison of experiences of numerous acquiantances, friends, co-workers, and family who have ever dealt with police, "resisting arrest" is a bullshit charge they throw in just to punish people for bothering to assert their right to trial instead of plea-bargaining guilty.
The problem with the FPS genre is that a hell of a lot of it has been done already. And so many designers aren't willing to break the mold, because the people bankrolling them don't WANT them to break the mold: they want Derivative FPS #56 to flesh out this fall's part of the EA or Ubisoft lineup because Derivative FPS #55 still sold well.
The secondary problem is that designers keep insisting on trying to put in lame-ass "puzzles" that just don't work in an FPS environment. The best example is jumping puzzles: when I got to the point of Duke Nukem Shoulneverhaveplayedit where there were fucking jumping puzzles, I just about screamed.
The final point... FPS design has regressed. Used to be, it was about exploration and options. Wide-open areas in Doom, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem 3D. For the last decade, though, it's just been one after another in a long line of goddamned corridor simulators.
Or maybe you're being willfully ignorant of the fact that the Southern Democrats almost to the man defected to the Republican Party, where their racist heritage persists to this day.
Yeah, I've been noticing the same thing. I'm willing to bet that they have a series of "sleeper accounts" being used to play the modpoint lottery a lot more than standard visitors. There seems to be a "bury brigade" effect going on subverting the mod system even more than usual.
Slashdot Mirror
Is not the example of "cash advance with a Discover card" the exact thing being done when you pass a budget that exceeds the debt ceiling and then simply expect that ceiling to be raised down the road? Hell, it's even worse than that -- it's like charging more to your credit card than your maximum spending limit and then just assuming the credit card will raise your cap to compensate.
No, it's more like starting a bunch of useless wars while passing tax cuts to billionaires, but keeping the war funding "off the books" until the next guy has to come in to office to clean up the fucking mess you created.
Which, come to think of it, is precisely what the Republicans did.
Yes, I am referring to PRECISELY the things the Republicans were screaming about the recent Health Care system overhaul bill.
It should be easy enough to analyze and identify the accounts involved if that is happening.
Not so. Only the Slashdot site mods themselves can see who modded on a given comment and when. As stated previously: the sleeper accounts are virtually invisible because they never post.
The top 10% of earners, above 114,000, pay 70% of all income taxes.
And 400 people control more than half of the wealth in the country. You don't see an inherent problem here?
So, no, the middle class pays less than the rich.
If you define "the rich" as people who make above $114,000 per year. Which still doesn't account for your lousy math and inability to calculate the crucial percentage of individual income number from what you claim above.
Meanwhile, Democrats have defined "the rich" as people making above $200k/year individually or $250k total household income. Republicans insist that these people are "not making all that much." What was your point about who the "rich" are again? Please do define your terms so that we can have an actual discussion here.
The lower 50%, below $33,000, pays almost nothing.
Funny thing about that: if you are making below $33,000 per year at today's prices, you have almost no disposable income to start with: you are making the equivalent of $6000 in 1970 money (feel free to run some other calculations yourself. This is especially true if you are a single parent or have someone else (aging family member) to support. The phrase you are looking for is "blood from a stone."
Short-term capital gains taxes go up with your tax bracket, and the rate is the same. Even if you bought something at $10,000 and a few laters it grew with inflation to $10,500, you still have to pay tax on the $500 even though you technically didn't make any money. Long-term rates are less in order to offset inflation losses and encourage long-term investment that helps the economy over quick flipping.
Please get an education and learn to stop lying. All you have to do is hold an "investment" for slightly longer than a year to get it taxed at a mere 15% instead of your actual income-tax rate. The more money people have, the more money they simply funnel through "cycling" schemes that contribute NOTHING to the economy, in order to take advantage of this loophole.
Capital gains taxes need to be eliminated, pure and simple, and any money gained that way treated as what it is, INCOME and taxed accordingly.
The only problem with your conspiracy theory is that mod points are handed out semi-randomly. They also expire after about 48 hours. Above and beyond that, you have to contribute and have your posts modded up to get mod points (at least that has been my experience).
Incorrect. As currently designed, mod points are good for a week after they are awarded.I have had a pool of 15 mod points to use for a few days now, but I chose to comment in many cases instead; thus, the system is broken because the people who abuse modfarming can use theirs freely, while good commenters are forced to choose between commenting and modding. I could moderate, and fix some of the abuses I'm seeing today, but only at the cost of my comments vanishing from this discussion.
There is also a "bias" towards giving mod points to accounts that have Excellent karma, but it's not that much higher than the chance given to "good" karma accounts. By definition, the sleeper mod accounts will never be modded below Good because they are not used for posting. No posts = no downmods. Good karma = a reasonably high chance that a sleeper account will have modpoints to burn, especially as an aggregate portion of a swarm of sleeper accounts.
Estanislao Mart describes the behavior of previous bot-farm makers. I am proposing that the behavior I am seeing on Slashdot is 100% consistent with this sort of behavior. Posts that are -1, Flamebait/Troll/Overrated fly up to 5, Insightful and posts that are 5, Insightful fall all the way to -1 in the span of only a few minutes, and they do it in large quantities - to the order of around 50 posts on which this behavior was happening. Many posts would vacillate up and down, between 0 and 4, continually as I refreshed the discussion.
This is not "moderating." On the scale this is occurring, someone has a point farm running and is abusing the system.
When comments that were previously at +5, Insightful are down to -1, Flamebait/Troll/Overrated in the span of ~10 minutes, it's a sure bet that the system is being abused.
Small problem with this theory:
In the same moment that the Republicans are screaming about how it's time to "cut costs" (e.g. fire employees), they are screaming about how "that damn evil nigger Obama" is "raising unemployment."
How, precisely, does firing a bunch of people lower unemployment? Doesn't it, in fact, RAISE unemployment?
Being a Republican requires a brain that can hold 4 contradictory ideas at once while not being aware of the level of cognitive dissonance at work.
The Republicans RELY on single-issue and low-information voters.
For single-issue, they have the "OMG THE GUVMINT WANTS TO DESTROY YOUR CHURCH" fringe, like what happened recently when they started to trump up accusations that Houston National Cemetary had banned the words "god" and "jesus" from ceremonies held there (not REMOTELY true, but that doesn't stop the noise machine from self-referencing and insisting "but I have a source" over and over again in an argument that would make even Wikipedia partisans look downright sane by comparison). Or they have the homophobe fringe, as evidenced the rise of Rick Santorum and Michele "Homophobe Barbie" Bachmann as candidates.
Fortunately, people are getting wise to these two fringes and they're falling fast.
The larger problem is the low-information/disinformation followers who are permanently attached to the noise machine, the kind of people who think Rush is actually "talent on loan from God" (as he bills himself), that Glenn Beck is anything but an insane psychopath, and that Fox News is actually "balanced" in any way, shape, or form.
The Faux News/Tea Partier "bury brigade" has been running through Slashdot lately, if you didn't notice. I just watched in the last hour as every insightful, factually supported comment that contradicted them got downmodded 2-3 points while every copypaste of their idiotic rants somehow got upmodded the same amount.
Someone's playing the modpoint lottery with a ton of fake accounts to pull this off. I counted roughly 300 points worth of modding in that short time frame. Slashdot never sees that kind of behavior in normal modding. The last time I saw this it was when the Ron Paulbots were out in force.
Well, yeah. What, you think Republicans would do something that doesn't benefit the ultra-rich at the expense of the peon class?
You forget: Republicans work like this.
I had a small amount of sympathy for them.
Then I went to one of their rallies and saw the raw racism and insanity of their followers.
"Taxed enough already" - you do realize taxes are the lowest that they've been since the 1950's, right? That the "top income earners" actually, after you count up all the loopholes and compare how much of their "income" actually gets taxed at the much lower Capital Gains rates, actually pay less in taxes than the middle class do?
This is the problem today. There is so much disinformation and misinformation spewed out there by Rush, Beck, Faux News, and the rest of the insane nutwing noise machine that large numbers of people are willing to give them the "well if even if a little of what they say is true" benefit of the doubt. And then we get people like you who wind up with "sympathy" for the Tea Partiers because you aren't informed enough to realize how full of crap the Tea Party is.
Typical Tea Party idiocy.
The Treasury Department can prioritize payments in order to avoid a default
Which means that seniors, people on medicare assistance due to crippling injuries or congenital disorders, and the military would then NOT GET their checks.
In addition, the Treasury could sell some of its assets in order to pay the bills.
Which assets, pray tell? And what do we do when the question of use of those assets comes up later? You sound like one of those "privatize the public parks and turn them all into Six Flags or Casino properties" fucktards.
There are approximately $2.6 trillion dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund; those assets can be used to pay benefits.
And once we do that, the Social Security trust fund ceases to generate revenue returns, because most of the "trust fund" is actually backing a number of other investments and GENERATING INTEREST.
Furthermore, there is already trillions of dollars of interagency debt that counts toward the $14.29 trillion debt limit. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could convert that inter-agency debt into publicly-held debt, preventing not only a technical default but also preventing any delay in government payments. While the Treasury cannot use money from the Social Security Trust Fund, it can “disinvest” from other trust funds to pay for benefits. The Treasury Department could also make cash available from the trust fund by “disinvesting” some of the money used to buy government bonds. The disinvesting approach is a temporary accounting device that would help maintain the Treasury’s cash flow.
In other words, you think playing shell games, the equivalent of paying this month's Mastercard bill with a cash advance from Discover Card, is a good idea?
FUCKTARD.
In other words, the debt ceiling being reached will have little affect on seniors, poor people, veterans, military + their families. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Republicans also offered to raise the debt limit as long as the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill was passed, and it is the president who is failing to compromise with them and is waging a mostly emotional political fight that has little to no basis on facts at the expense of not coming to an agreement in time.
You're a fucking fool. The "Cut, Cap, and Balance" bill is one step shy of this level of dishonestycome out of the Tea Party crowd lately.
Also, for god's sake, learn the difference between "effect" and "affect" please. I swear, you Republicans should learn to get beyond your 2nd-grade-equivalent "high school diplomas" with the school administrator's name scrawled in crayon.
DJ Hero was crap.
The first problem was that the controller was RSI-inducing after only a couple minutes.
The second problem was that the music was shit.
The third problem is that Guitar Hero/Rock Band are COMMUNITY games; you need to be able to have friends pick up and play with you. DJ'ing is not a community activity.
Kotick, meanwhile, should be fired for his policy of running franchises into the ground constantly. Activision's primary mistake is keeping him and his suck-ups on the payroll.
Intriguing. You would have preferred Nazi domination of Europe then?
No, the ruling was a fucking joke.
The key wording is that the FLIR cameras were "not in general use by the public" and were therefore disallowed.
Several appellate courts have now ruled that in their jurisdictions, the cameras are "widely available to the public" and therefore "in general use" and therefore no longer covered by the Kyllo ruling.
Always gotta watch for the weasel words that bribed assholes like Thomas slip into the rulings. The devil's in the details...
If this document was ever covered by any of the various discovery orders in any of the various filesharing lawsuits, then the failure of the media companies to release it is at very least contempt of court, not to mention prejudicial reason to overturn the results of any and all similar cases in favor of the defendants.
That didn't stop the US Supreme Court from ruling that police helicopters operating infared cameras scanning houses from above were not a "search."
Of course, that ruling also involved Clarence "just bribe my wife" Thomas. So, maybe it'll one day be reversed by a saner court.
Dr. Bob, the orderlies are coming, please relax until they arrive. How did you slip the straightjacket this time?
Yeah. This was more a case of "You idiot prosecutor, the law you charged them under has nothing to do with this case and is completely inapplicable. Oh, and by the way, we don't agree with the trumped-up 'resisting arrest' bullshit you tried to tag on either."
From comparison of experiences of numerous acquiantances, friends, co-workers, and family who have ever dealt with police, "resisting arrest" is a bullshit charge they throw in just to punish people for bothering to assert their right to trial instead of plea-bargaining guilty.
The plea bargain system is about forcing the innocent to plead guilty, nothing else.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill.
The problem with the FPS genre is that a hell of a lot of it has been done already. And so many designers aren't willing to break the mold, because the people bankrolling them don't WANT them to break the mold: they want Derivative FPS #56 to flesh out this fall's part of the EA or Ubisoft lineup because Derivative FPS #55 still sold well.
The secondary problem is that designers keep insisting on trying to put in lame-ass "puzzles" that just don't work in an FPS environment. The best example is jumping puzzles: when I got to the point of Duke Nukem Shoulneverhaveplayedit where there were fucking jumping puzzles, I just about screamed.
The final point... FPS design has regressed. Used to be, it was about exploration and options. Wide-open areas in Doom, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem 3D. For the last decade, though, it's just been one after another in a long line of goddamned corridor simulators.
Or maybe you're being willfully ignorant of the fact that the Southern Democrats almost to the man defected to the Republican Party, where their racist heritage persists to this day.
They forgot "unlicensed possession of a Triforce of Power."
Yeah, I've been noticing the same thing. I'm willing to bet that they have a series of "sleeper accounts" being used to play the modpoint lottery a lot more than standard visitors. There seems to be a "bury brigade" effect going on subverting the mod system even more than usual.
Probably because only Republicans are associated with this kind of behavior.